Signifying harassment: Communication,ambiguity and power

This essay reports on phenomenological research conducted with people who describe having been harassed, having been accused of harassment, and/or having mediated or adjudicated harassment disputes. The authors review recent legal conceptions of sexual harassment and articulate a methodology for analyzing individual narrative accounts. The analysis of six selected interviews (three alleged harassers and three declared harassees) depicts how, through discourse with others, persons in ambiguous cases of harassment come to perceive themselves as harassers or harasseesgradually, how intention is inferred from conductcontingently, and how perceptions and expressions are often reified as certainties in the effort to secure some sense of justiceinstitutionally.Many people have been involved with this project since its inception, and most wish to remain anonymous. We would like to thank all participants, colleagues, students, and critics for their contributions and expressions of interest. We would especially like to acknowledge Thomas Pace and Richard Lanigan for their teaching, friendship and support, and Frances Chaput Waksler for her helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented to The Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Boston MA, USA, October 1992.     

Marriage and Family Counseling

This article provides an overview of marriage and family counseling, including the growth and interest of this specialty within the American Counseling Association (ACA). Areas discussed include the evolution of marriage and family counseling within ACA, standards for training, credentialing, and unique ethical considerations when counseling couples and families.     

Perceiving geographical slant

People judged the inclination of hills viewed either out-of-doors or in a computer-simulated virtual environment. Angle judgments were obtained by having people (1) provide verbal estimates, (2) adjust a representation of the hill’s cross-section, and (3) adjust a tilt board with their unseen hand. Geographical slant was greatly overestimated according to the first two measures, but not the third. Apparent slant judgments conformed to ratio scales, thereby enhancing sensitivity to the small inclines that must actually be traversed in everyday experience. It is proposed that the perceived exaggeration of geographical slant preserves the relationship between distal inclination and people’s behavioral potential. Hills are harder to traverse as people become tired; hence, apparent slant increased with fatigue. Visually guided actions must be accommodated to the actual distal properties of the environment; consequently, the tilt board adjustments did not reflect apparent slant overestimations, nor were they influenced by fatigue. Consistent with the fact that steep hills are more difficult to descend than to ascend, these hills appeared steeper when viewed from the top.     

Children's capacity to agree to psychological research: knowledge of risks and benefits and voluntariness

A series of studies investigated the capacity of children between the ages of 7 and 12 to give free and informed consent to participation in psychological research. Children were reasonably accurate in describing the purpose of studies, but many did not understand the possible benefits or especially the possible risks of participating. In several studies children's consent was not affected by the knowledge that their parents had given their permission or by the parents saying that they would not be upset if the children refused. In contrast, other studies found that children were much more likely to stop their participation if the experimenter said explicitly that she would not be upset if they stopped. We suggest that experimenters should pay more attention to describing the possible risks and benefits of participation in research, and that they should also make it clearer to children that they are free to stop once they have begun.     

The assessment of cortisol using salivary ultrafiltrate

Cortisol can be used to indicate stress level as well as to monitor certain disease states. Although cortisol can be sampled from blood and urine, saliva sampling has decided advantages. Unfortunately, whole saliva contains a number of substances that can metabolize or bind with cortisol, potentially confounding analysis and quantitation. We introduce a semipermeable pouch that accumulates a contaminant-free salivary ultrafiltrate, thereby overcoming a number of the problems encountered with whole saliva. In three studies, we demonstrate accuracy and utility of the device for cortisol determination: (1) in an artificial medium, 60%–77% of the cortisol was recovered in the ultrafiltrate; (2) in vivo, ultrafiltrate cortisol correlated highly with whole-saliva cortisol collected under ideal conditions; and (3) ultrafiltrate cortisol evinced positive relationships with depression and cigarette use, consistent with studies in the literature. We conclude that this device and saliva-filtering technologies in general are useful in applications requiring quantitation of cortisol.     

U.S.- and Mexico-born Hispanic teen mothers: a descriptive study of factors that relate to postpartum compliance

Compliance with postpartum visits after teenage births in the US was examined among 289 Hispanic teenagers, of whom 127 were born in Mexico or border towns, who delivered at Harris County Hospital District and scheduled postpartum appointments at the Teen Health Clinic. The mean age was 17.31 years for mothers and 21.95 years for fathers. 56.7% (164) were married. 49.8% lived with husbands, 25.8% with parents, 22.3% with friends/relatives, and 2.1% alone. 74.7% stated that they had no social supports. 88.9% had a term delivery, 8.3% a preterm delivery, and 2.8% a fetal loss. 67.5% were first births, 5.5% had a previous abortion, and 3.1% had a previous miscarriage. 23.2% had a previous child, and 0.7% had a previous preterm delivery. Some form of prenatal care was received by 85.1%. 34.3% reported no further educational plans. 17.3% (50) returned for a scheduled postpartum visit. Mothers with a prior history of a premature birth or miscarriage were more likely to return postpartum compared to mothers with a first or prior birth. The differences are marginally significant. None of the mothers with a prior abortion returned. 34.9% of the returning teen mothers were more likely to have had prenatal care. Returning mothers also were a larger percentage of those with no future educational plans. 13.4% of returning mothers had an available social support system. Country of origin was not associated with support systems, prenatal care, return status, educational plans, pregnancy history, or current birth outcome. Out of the 50 returning, 20 were Mexican-born and married. Only Mexican marital status was found to be a significant variable explaining differences. Marital status had no effect on the 26 US native-born returnees. 92% of the Mexican-born teens were married and had a support system. The most dramatic feature of this study is the high level of noncompliance among both US-born and Mexican-born adolescents. There were few distinguishing features between these two groups. Return status was affected by very few features and was achieved by a very small percentage of the study population. The suggestion is made that poverty, a lack of health insurance, and poor knowledge of English, as representative of cultural dissimilarity, may be responsible for poor use of preventive care.     

Report of the ACA Ethics Committee: 1993–1994

The activities of the American Counseling Association (ACA) Ethics Committee are reviewed for the year 1993–1994. Summary data of ethical complaints and formal inquiries received during the year are presented followed by a brief discussion of trends noted. Updated information about the revision of the ACA Ethical Standards and the Policies and Procedures for Processing Complaints of Ethical Violations is also provided.     

IMPLICIT MEMORY IN AMNESIC PATIENTS:

Abstract— Previous observations of spared priming in amnesic patients have been based almost entirely on data from visual implicit memory tests Our research examined perceptual priming.in amnesic patients and control subjects on an auditory identification task in which previously spoken words and new words were presented in white noise We manipulated type of encoding task (semantic vs nonsemantic) and speaker's voice at study and test (same vs different) Priming was little affected.by either manipulation, and amnesic patients exhibited normal priming in all experimental conditions On an explicit test of recognition memory, by contrast, amnesic patients exhibited.severely impaired performance following the semantic study task, all subjects showed poor explicit memory following the nonsemantic study task Results are consistent with the idea that auditory priming depends largely on a presemantic auditory perceptual representation system